October 2013

If you think your house has bad cellular coverage, Verizon Wireless has you beat: A small, windowless room high up in a San Francisco office building gets no service at all.

The room with zero bars is in the heart of the Verizon Innovation Center, where Verizon network and business experts help developers of new wireless devices and apps to turn their ideas into products. The center opened there about two years ago, setting up shop in a hotbed of startup activity in the tech-heavy Bay Area. The tiny lab lets product developers test out how their devices or apps will work in different situations, such as strong network signals near a cell tower, weak coverage at the edge of the cell, and even traveling at high speed through a certain type of network, Gagan Puranik, associate director of Verizon's innovation centers, said. All these can be simulated in the sealed room, using Verizon's regular frequencies, because the signals from Verizon's commercial network can't interfere there, he said. The carrier started the Innovation Center to help create an ecosystem that would drive usage of its LTE network, which now carries about 60 percent of Verizon's mobile traffic, according to Verizon Executive Vice President and CTO Tony Melone.

[Commentary] If there's one thing AT&T loves to talk about, it's how government regulations designed to protect consumers are really annoying. In particular, the company says that century-old rules designed to spread phone service to all Americans should be eliminated as the country moves from traditional phone lines to all-IP (Internet Protocol) networks, a transition AT&T wants to see happen by 2018 or 2020.

The company's latest attempt to sway public opinion toward its anti-regulation views comes in the form of research by the Internet Innovation Alliance, which is bankrolled in part by AT&T and consistently pushes AT&T's agenda. The group previously extolled the "positive effects" for consumers of an AT&T/T-Mobile merger, a deal blocked by the federal government's antitrust authorities. The group pushed out a report titled "Telecommunications competition: the infrastructure-investment race," by Georgetown professor Anna-Maria Kovacs. The report's findings are proof that regulation is bad for the broadband market, the Alliance argued. Most US consumers "rely on the use of smart wireless devices, cellphones, wired Internet-enabled VoIP services, and over-the-top Internet-enabled applications (i.e., Skype), far more than on traditional telephony to stay connected in today’s digital age," the alliance continues. More than half the $154 billion spent on communications networks between 2006 to 2011 went to "maintaining fading legacy networks, leaving less than half to upgrade and expand their high-speed broadband networks," the report concluded. The upshot is that "outdated regulations are unnecessarily diverting investment from broadband." The AT&T-funded group's report comes down heavily on copper-based networks, saying the regulations designed for them are often "technologically inapplicable" to fiber-based IP networks. Expanding fiber access is a worthy goal, of course. But many Americans still rely on copper-based DSL for Internet access, and telecoms have proven themselves uninterested in replacing copper with fiber in all parts of the country.

The Federal Communications Commission has a “regulatory addiction and ... penchant for picking winners and losers” and the laws governing the agency need a “substantial overhaul,” House Commerce Committee Vice Chairwoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said.

The agency is hurting the telecommunications industry and crowding out private investment because it “is fixated on growing its jurisdictional footprint and expanding its influence in other areas,” Rep Blackburn said, speaking at a Telecommunications Industry Association event. Rep Blackburn pointed to the FCC’s “so-called net neutrality regulations” and its Lifeline program, or what has been called the “Obamaphone welfare,” program. The agency needs “better transparency and a better process” so that it steps in “only when true harms and market failures are accurately quantified,” she said.

[Commentary] The United States needs to strike a balance between respecting individual freedoms and protecting national security, says everyone from the director of national intelligence to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It’s the standard reaction to the stream of revelations about the extensive security state, a stream that may not end any time soon. The fact that younger people are more apt to be anti-surveillance state may not contradict the conventional wisdom of the Internet as much as it (apparently) does that of political scientists. But whether or not its catalyst is 9/11, the generational divide does seem to suggest that the way our politicians balance privacy and security will shift as the under-40s take control. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward the youngs.